Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

In estimating the consequences to the man and the woman, it is impossible to neglect the psychological results.

The effect upon the mind is far stronger and more lasting than any more direct result. I mean, it is what the individual woman or man feels about limitation that is important for them. It is their own attitude to what they do that will mainly decide the results it will have. This is a question of the deepest complication. And much more knowledge is needed, and the greatest care is called for not to form hasty and unproved opinions. It is, I must insist, an individual question that can never be arbitrarilly decided, even by those competent to form a decision. That is why so much that is said, even by doctors who ought to know better, is so absurd.

Much easier to estimate is the effect upon the child. Here we seem to be on firmer ground. To save the unwanted child from being born or conceived by drunken or syphilitic parents is a work of such plain morality that there would appear to be no room for difference of opinion.

Yet the question is deeper and far more difficult than this; there are, indeed, a whole group of problems connected with it. There is, for instance, the case of the only child, who always suffers grave disadvantages, brought up in a home with adults.

Again the childless or one-child marriage is often not happy for those who love children. This is felt, in particular, when one partner desires children and the other refuses to have them born. And it must not be forgotten that all that affects the parents, must also have its results on any child that is born. Apart from economic necessities, the small, limited family is, in many ways, harder to bring up than the large family.

With regard to the effect of birth control on society, it is now becoming a familiar reflection that often those least fitted to carry out parental duties, because of faults of character or misfortune of circumstances, have the largest families.

Here the main problem is not so much to teach the mere knowledge of how families are to be limited as to induce that control and to stir up such desire as will lead to limitation being practised.

But of course, the alteration of the characters of men and women is a task of too great difficulty to be treated as a side issue.

Yet I would not end with any word of discouragement. As I started by saying, the mere consideration of these difficult questions in the broad light of day must be felt, by all of us who are old enough to remember the attitude in the past, as a wholesome sign of the times.

We care more, and very slowly we are growing more honest.